Frankfurt - Only the sky was the limit when Yvonne Buschbaum soared to big heights as one of the leading women's pole vaulters in Germany.

Now the sky is wide open for Buschbaum, who feels the lightness of being after revealing her transsexuality last year and undergoing a gender change to Balian Buschbaum since then.

"Courage is the road to freedom. I woke up in complete freedom today. The sky is wide open," said a recent diary entry on his website.

Wolfsburg, Germany  - The new Golf VI generation has been given a top safety rating in the independent EuroNCAP crash test.

Testers described the model as an improvement on the predecessor Golf V, which scored lower marks against its main competitor, the Opel Astra.

The Golf scored 36 out of 37 possible points on occupant, pedestrian and child safety, with a maximum five-star rating for occupant safety.

Stuttgart  - Porsche is said to be downplaying plans to build a special economical four-cylinder version of the Boxter, the British Autocar magazine has reported, quoting company sources.

A Porsche spokesman described the report as "pure speculation." The next generation of the Boxter Roadster and the Cayman coupe would still be offered with a six-cylinder engine, the spokesman added. He pointed out that they would be more economical because of direct injection systems.

London  - England's preparations for Wednesday's friendly against Germany in Berlin were dealt another blow late Tuesday when Arsenal winger Theo Walcott was ruled out because of a dislocated shoulder.

The 19-year-old, who scored a hat-trick in England's World Cup qualifying win in Croatia, suffered the injury in training in Berlin.

He was taken to hospital, where the shoulder was put back into place, but Walcott is now set to fly home.

Wellington  - German tourist Julia Jahn, 20, kept telling herself she was too young to die as she struggled for five hours to keep her head above water after her kayak became trapped on a New Zealand river, a newspaper reported on Wednesday.

"I was thinking I want to survive. I'm still young. I don't want to die, so I had such a big will to live," Jahn, from Bavaria, told the Dominion Post as she talked about Friday's ill-fated kayak trip in the wilderness of the North Island's Whanganui River.

Berlin  - The historic Adriatic port of Trieste was an appropriate backdrop for Tuesday's meeting between Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which was held as Rome prepares to head the Group of Eight (G8) leading industrial states.

Once a flourishing city lying at the intersection of pre-First World War political life, Trieste suffered a rather sharp decline in its fortunes following the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the shift in the international balance of power.